Faced with the delightful prospect of a concert from a great orchestra, it’s easy to put the tragedy now unfolding in a faraway country firmly out of mind. Mariss Jansons, chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, wasn’t going to let that happen. At this concert in the orchestra’s own hall he spoke of the many ties between the orchestra and Japan, and his great affection for the country. He then conducted a tenderly expressive performance of Solveig’s Song from Grieg’s Peer Gynt, and motioned us to our feet for a minute’s silence.

It was a perfectly judged gesture, which contained in concentrated form the heartfelt, straightforward humanity of the music-making that followed. There’s something refreshing in the way Jansons refuses to micro-manage the players, preferring to bring forth by some subtle empathy their own musicality. In the first piece, Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, he was alert to the soloist Mitsuko Uchida’s quicksilver changability. This is Beethoven in his fiercely tragic C minor mood, and Uchida certainly gave those massive octaves a steely, deliberate weight.

But the heart of this performance was elsewhere, in the fugitive romantic colours in the middle of the first movement, and in the luxuriantly slow middle movement. Some would have found this altogether too slow, but Uchida wanted to give each dusky harmonic change its own flavour, and that takes time. By the end she and the orchestra had lulled us all into a kind of waking slumber.

Only the finale seemed a slight disappointment. The fierce onrush is interrupted by one of Beethoven’s surprising harmonic turns, which re-opens the door to that other, visionary world. It should be a wonderful moment, but in this measured performance it seemed somewhat muted.

After that taste of sublimity, the noisy swagger of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben could have seemed a terrible let-down. In fact it wasn’t because Jansons endowed this sly self-portrait with such a rich, spacious humanity. The composer’s ardent wooing is represented by a solo violin, played here by orchestra’s leader Anton Barachovsky with such passionate force that the sound rebounded off the walls – which in the cavernous barn of the Munich Philharmonie is quite some feat. But there were plenty of other fine soloists too, and the overall sound was gorgeously refulgent. London audiences are in for a treat when the orchestra visits later this week.